Tuesday, 17 December 2013

What does learning look like?

by John Yandell, Institute of Education

In
the dominant educational discourse, there is a simple answer to this
question.

This
is the Ofsted model, a view of learning promulgated by everyone from former
Ofsted chief Chris Woodhead to current Ofsted head Michael Wilshaw and that has
been normalised in school practices by two decades of the inspection regime.

The
Ofsted model looks something like this: Learning is the product of teaching,
the output produced by definite, pre-specified and discernible inputs. It
happens in individuals. It is linear. It
is easily measured, not only through standardised tests but also through more
immediate metrics (question and answer sessions, traffic lights, exit passes
and a cornucopia of other lesson plenaries).

I
want to question each of these assumptions.
Before I do so, however, it is worth exploring why this model is so
seductive – and who has been seduced by it.

For
governments of a technical-rationalist bent it provides the perfect managerial
tool, since it enables the complexity of schooling to be reduced to data –
solid, comfortable, numerical data – data that enable robust comparisons to be
made between individual learners and groups of learners, between teachers and
schools.

For
if this is what learning looks like, it is entirely reasonable to represent
learning as a national curriculum level: learning to read then becomes the same
thing as attaining a level 4. The level 4 becomes a thing in itself, and
literacy levels can be ascertained by nothing more complex than totting up the
number of learners who are proud possessors of a level 4.

There
is a further stage to this process of reification (turning abstractions like
levels into concrete things), and it is a particularly grisly stage: the child
becomes the level. Thus it is that teachers refer to learners along the lines
of “She’s a level 5” or “He’s a level 3” – and children talk about themselves
in the same terms: “I am a 4c.”

The
next stage in this process is that six-year-olds are to be deemed to have
learnt how reading works if they make the right noises when confronted with
forty decontextualised words (or non-words).
(If they make the wrong noises more than six times, they will already be
judged to be on the slippery slope to terminal illiteracy.)

This
process of reification matters hugely.
It transforms learning and learners into data and schools into data-rich
environments. Equally important, though, is the assumption that learning is
straightforwardly the product of teaching.
This means that teachers, individually and collectively, can be held
directly accountable for learning (the learning that is represented in those
neat data-sets).

The
implications of this are made explicit in the recent Ofsted Evaluation
Schedule: “The most important role of teaching is to promote learning so as to
raise pupils’ achievement” (Ofsted 2012: 11). It is worth pausing to note that
learning here appears, very clearly, not as an end in itself but as a means to
an end: learning is for raising achievement.
One might also want to ask what raising achievement is for. Is it for the benefit of the learner, the
teacher, the school, the nation?

Elsewhere
in the same Ofsted document, the official meaning of “achievement” is spelled
out:

When
judging achievement, inspectors should take account of:

• pupils’ attainment in relation to
national standards and compared to all schools, based on data over the last
three years ...

• pupils’ progress in the last three years
as shown by value-added indices for the school overall and for different groups
of pupils, together with expected rates of progress

• the learning and progress of pupils
currently in the school based on inspection evidence (Ofsted 2012: 6).

Each
of these three sources of “evidence” raises its own problems. The first, which,
in effect, frames and informs every Ofsted inspection, could be summed up by
the title of one of Michael Wilshaw’s recent speeches: “High expectations, no
excuses” (Wilshaw 2012) In the Ofsted
model, raw results are the measure of every school and every pupil – and to
suggest otherwise is to hide behind mere “excuses”. This fits in well with Wilshaw’s mythological
approach to the history of schooling:

Certainly,
Ofsted was key in transforming my life as a teacher and headteacher. Our
education system is much better because of greater accountability in the
system. Those who think we haven’t made progress need to remember what it was
like before Ofsted. I certainly do. In the seventies and eighties, when I
worked in places like Peckham, Bermondsey, Hackney and West Ham, whole generations
of children and young people were failed.

The
school where I was head before moving to Ofsted, Mossbourne Academy in Hackney,
stands on the site of Hackney Downs School, which in its day represented the
worst excesses of that period. But there would have been many others just as
bad that never hit the headlines and got away with blue murder (Wilshaw 2012).

In
describing this account as a myth, I am not suggesting that everything in the
garden was lovely before Ofsted came along.
Young people were failed by the education system before Ofsted – but
they are still being failed by the education system today. And there are other stories to tell of
Hackney Downs, stories of exemplary work by dedicated teachers, stories of
local curricula developed collaboratively, stories of a shared commitment to
social justice.

There
is, too, in Wilshaw’s version of history a crucial sleight of hand: the fact
that Mossbourne stands on the site where Hackney Downs once stood might lead
one to assume that the intake of the two schools was also the same – and that
really would be a mistake. If your
school wants to play the Ofsted game in relation to achievement, the first
thing to sort out is the admissions policy.

The
second source of Ofsted’s evidence on achievement might look much more nuanced,
more attuned to issues of diversity.
After all, the mention of “value-added” suggests an awareness that
learners are different, come from different kinds of home, have different needs,
and so on.

But
one shouldn’t get too carried away by this vestige of New Labour. There is
still the assumption that learning is a matter of linear progress, still an
obsession with the reductive abstractions of units of data. Accountability becomes nothing more than data
tracking and monitoring, equality is reduced to questions of access and social
mobility.

What
matters here are the questions that cannot be asked: questions about curriculum
content and design, questions about students’ different histories, cultures,
funds of knowledge, values, affiliations and aspirations. These things matter because they shape
profoundly students’ sense of themselves as learners and their day-to-day
experiences in the classroom.

The
third source of evidence about achievement embodies the assumption that
judgements about the learning and achievement of pupils can or should be based
on twenty minutes or so of lesson observation.

Before
I launch into what is wrong with this assumption, I should make a couple of
things clear. I believe that teachers
and schools should be accountable. I
also believe that that accountability should involve the observation of lessons
by a range of different people, including people who are not teachers.

What
gets missed out of the Ofsted model, however, is any sense of complexity – the
complexity of classrooms, the complexity of the interactions that take place
within them, the complexity of any halfway adequate understanding of learning
as a process.

The
Wilshaw version is breathtakingly simple.
Schools are “good” or “outstanding” – or they are not (and if they are
not, they “require improvement”). If a school is “outstanding”, the teaching is
similarly “outstanding”; if a school is less than “good”, the pupils suffer
from an unremitting diet of less-than-good teaching.

These
reified judgements about a school are themselves an abstraction from a series
of separate abstractions, reified judgements of individual teachers and
individual lessons. Just as learners
become the level that is attached to them, so teachers become “outstanding” or
“satisfactory” – sorry, “requiring improvement”.

Of
course, if someone tells you that you are outstanding, it tends to make you
feel better about yourself – and even to accept the validity of the label.
That’s why the process can be seductive for teachers, too. If, on the other hand, someone tells you that
you’re merely satisfactory, that can be pretty devastating – and it is hard not
to internalise this judgement.

This
grading system has two pernicious effects.
The first is that it tends to undermine collegiality, to produce in
reality the atomised, divided, individualist system that it purports to
describe. It has the same corrosive
effect on teacher identity as the testing regime has on learner identity.

The
second is that it adversely influences teaching itself. It encourages teachers to teach to the Ofsted
model, to reconfigure their practice to conform to their sense of what is
prescribed. Learning becomes bite-sized,
specified by objectives or “outcomes”, measurable within the space of a single
lesson, or even a single activity within a lesson.

In
the first phase of Ofsted, this was less significant. Teachers might vary their practice when the
inspectors came to call, giving them the lessons that they understood they
wanted to see, but would generally revert to more diverse pedagogies in the
spaces in between inspections.

Now,
however, the problem is less Ofsted itself than Ofsted-in-the-head: enforced
through the monitoring and observation of school management teams and
consultants, the routines have become internalised. The danger then becomes that we all take the
Ofsted model as valid, as if it told the truth about learning or teaching, as
if the labels were the reality.

I
want to finish by returning to my initial representation of the Ofsted model,
to propose alternatives to each of its foundational assumptions.

1. Learning is the product of teaching, the
output produced by definite, pre-specified and discernible inputs.

No,
it’s not. Teachers have a responsibility to plan for learning and to intervene
in the learning process, to introduce learners to new concepts, new
experiences, new ways of seeing themselves, each other and the world. But learning is unpredictable, messy and
polymorphous; it is contested, mysterious and often elusive.

2. It happens in individuals.

No,
it doesn’t. Learning is irreducibly
social and hugely contingent. It
involves – and arises out of – the interaction of human beings with each other,
with particular resources in particular places.

3. It is linear.

No,
it’s not. The idea that someone has to
master the basics before they can progress to more advanced stuff is deeply
problematic. And it is simply false to
assume that something is learnt once and for all: learning is recursive,
layered, and multidimensional. Getting a picture of what learners know or can
do is worthwhile, but always fraught with difficulty. (A child holding up a green card at the end
of a lesson isn’t hard evidence of anything other than a desire to please the
teacher.)

4. It is easily measured, not only through
standardised tests but also through more immediate metrics

No,
no, no. The only things to do with learning that are easily measured are things
so trivial as not to be worth bothering with in the first place. Real, worthwhile learning is always complex,
and it tends to happen – and be observable – over much longer periods of time
than a single lesson. Teachers have an understanding of learning that is
inseparable from their long-tem, always-changing, picture of learners and their
development: that is what makes teaching both difficult and massively
rewarding.

References

Ofsted
(2012) The evaluation schedule for the inspection of maintained schools and
academies January 2012, No. 090098.
Available online at
<http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/evaluation-schedule-for-inspection-of-maintained-schools-and-academies-january-2012>

Wilshaw,
M. (2012) “High expectations, no excuses” (speech to the London Leadership
Strategy’s Good to Great conference, 9 February 2012). Available online at
<http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/news/high-expectation-no-excuses-sir-michael-wilshaw-hmci-outlines-changes-ofsted-inspection-drive-delive-0>